In May of 1857, land speculators from the Dakota Land Company of St. Paul, Minnesota Territory, surveyed and located the town site of Eminija in this area. Eminija was the Santee Sioux name for the Split Rock River, which flows at the base of the hill to the east. The site covered 640 acres, including the junctions of Beaver Creek, the Split Rock, and Big Sioux Rivers, all south of this point. It was declared the county seat of Vermillion County on the Sioux River, 13 miles below the Falls and at what promoters called the more practical head of navigation for large steamers. From 1857 through 1861, imaginative reports in the Minnesota press praised the area's timber, soil, crops, wild fruits, steamboat trade, and sawmills. Other town sites along the Big Sioux River surveyed by the Dakota Land Company included Medary, Flandreau, and Sioux Falls City. The recorded plat for Eminija, filed in a Minnesota Territory land office, has never been found. The only known reference to the town site's location appears in the field notes of Alfred J. Hill, an archaeologist, civil engineer, and geographer, who visited in 1860 to describe and map it as part of a regional study of Indian mound sites. He was guided by Byron M. Smith, the Dakota Land Company surveyor who had defined the boundary line three years earlier, and Hill stated that the north line passed through the largest of the ancient Indian mounds visible to the west. Dakota Land Company employees built a log cabin on the town site about 250 yards to the southeast of this spot. Early maps showed Eminija at the juncture of the Split Rock and Big Sioux Rivers, with stagecoach and wagon roads leading to Sioux Falls City, to New Ulm and Blue Earth, and south along the Big Sioux River to Sioux City. Eminija had a stage stop, but it and other enterprises were short lived. The Civil War, the Sioux War of 1862, and a national election politically unfavorable to the company brought upheaval to the region, and Eminija became a casualty of rapid and turbulent change on the Dakota frontier.